Social Web Tips

When putting together advertising campaigns, it's useful to fully exploit the multitude of ad sizes that networks offer. (…)

An interview with Satish and I was just posted over at HatchThat.com. In the interview we talk about our latest project, cantwaitforchristmas.com - how we came up with it, what the response has been like thus far, and also what happens when Christmas finally arrives.

In light of the holiday spirit, Satish and I decided to build a simple site that would celebrate all the things everyone is looking forward to come this Christmas.

I’ve had several great ideas on how to build a site or what content to create for months now, but the lack of time doesn’t allow me to do much.

As time passes by, I notice people doing what I thought would be a good idea or already developed sites, right what I was thinking about. This was and is not only amuzing, but also interesting.

For example, I’ve noticed this phenomenon a while ago and surely enough, Aaron Wall finally writes about sharing your ideas now (with more examples of this lazy bloggers plague).

Do it now

It simply means that if you want to gain a larger share in the market, you need to start and act now. Since otherwise, other thoughtful rivals and brilliant minds will come up with the same ideas and benefit from them. And you’ll be trailing at the back.

Why do other people have the same ideas?

Sometimes, this can be really creepy. Once, I’ve had an idea and the same day I’ve seen a newly built website, based on the idea. Other times, I was just thinking of building a worthy post, and bam, someone else does it before me.

Why does this happen?

If you:

• are an active reader of the thought leaders’ blogs
• learn what your customers want every day
• always seek ways to provide value to your target audience
• talk with other industry experts, share ideas and get amazing feedback in return
• observe what other industries are doing and think if you can use those ideas

you should have a solid understanding of what your customers want and have plenty of neat ideas in your head.

It also means that your rivals, who are doing the same, have them too.

In a SEO Refugee thread (you’ll need to register to access members-only subforum), I said that it happens, because “we feel the pulse of the industry”, we live it and come up with natural extensions to provide value to our customers.

How to cope with it?

Generally, the only solution would be to actually do what you want. But, most likely, in order to do that, you’ll need to find more time. Here’s how:

• prioritize your actions
• stop wasting time on useless stuff
• do things more productively
• get someone to do mindless repetitive tasks, if you can
• only focus on your core competency (that’s the normal advice in outsourcing, btw)

Another thing you might wonna do is to stop being afraid to do something that will propel your business. While you need to differentiate the fear that prevents you from doing a stupid thing from the fear that holds you back, you should think about it.

Share your ideas

When it comes to ideas for blog posts, you really must write now what you want to share with your readers, because otherwise, you won’t. Paraphrasing Seth Godin, who said

ideas are easy, doing stuff is hard

I’ll say that writing what other people should do is easy, doing things is hard.

So start writing and sharing your ideas with the world (if that’s what you want to do, anyway).

As Seth Godin says:

My feeling is that the more often you create and share ideas, the better you get at it.

So, if you’ve got ideas, let them go. They’re probably holding you back from the hard work of actually executing.

Thus, sharing ideas will let you actually do something.

Speaking of which, if you recommend something on your blog, you are more likely to do it to at least the blog and maybe to your other sites. Writing helps you better understand what you know, because you may not be using your own knowledge for yourself.

Write your posts now

While there may be more things to hold you back from doing something in real life, there’s less things holding you from writing, blogging and sharing your ideas with your audience.

So instead of planning, setting a posting schedule and only fixing yourself to write only one of posts (even if it is superb quality posts), you may want to share your ideas when you have them to:

• create timely content for your site
• actually create posts that you would have otherwise not written
• get more ideas from writing (like I’ve got a post idea from writing this one)
• start putting your ideas to life
• gaining a significantly larger market share

Aaron Wall should be a good example of writing when he wants to (I think he admitted doing it, at least). Aaron now comes up with plenty of interesting, worthy posts almost daily and I can’t stop marveling at his writing productivity. Needless to say, Aaron’s blog far more popular than an average SEO blog.

While the reason to have plenty ideas is to work a lot, the concept of writing when you have it still rings true to me.

Examples

For example, a post, describing all the ways to improve and write titles, which I have been thinking about for a while, was a hit and is one of the most popular posts on the site.

Another example that I invested a lot of time in is 20+ tips on improving a blog. And it worked wonderfully. I haven’t regretted for a second that I have spent hours on these two posts.

Go, do it now

Link to this post:

http://www.improvetheweb.com/

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I’ve been tagged by Elizabeth to write about what I am doing, when not doing SEO.

Run

When I have a full time job, I run in the morning (2-6am). It turned out I can’t make myself run, if I don’t have a financial guarantee to afford food and equipment in the long run (literally, too), btw.

In winter, it is mostly fast, short runs, while in summer I tend to run for hours.

Cook

As Elizabeth, I also cook, but nothing fancy. It doesn’t mean it isn’t delicious though.

Macaroni with melted honey, butter and cheese? Yum!

Or maybe potatoes+mushrooms+tomatos+greenery?

• roasted/boiled potatoes (one dish)
• roasted mushrooms (another dish)
• sliced tomatos with coriander (silantro), dill, parsley and spring onions (and another dish)?

This combo is just fantastic, if you have the patience to cook it (usually, it takes under an hour, or it can take less, if you use two heating elements or put it all into one pan).

How about delicious roasted eggplants (aubergines)?

• roast sliced onion and carrot(s)
• add squared/sliced eggplants
• spice it up with small pinches of salt, curry, cinnamon, saffron, powdered ginger, paprika and whatever else you want
• then add sliced sweet pepper
• and finally, add sliced tomatos
• roast/stew till the vegetables are soft (about 30min for everything, if I remember right)

I hope you have had a bite

And to top it off, everything above is vegan (not just vegeterian), so it is suitable for everyone (except for someone not eating vegetables, if there is such a spicies).

Learn languages

On the weekends, when there isn’t much to do, I often brush my English (been a while, though), improve my German and learn French. Learning languages is a good pasttime to keep your brain busy (and give you a chance to travel/communicate online easier).

Tag bloggers

Since I have to tag at least three persons, I’d like to tag:

• Steve Bradley
• Benjamin Cook
• Kichus

Link to this post:

http://www.improvetheweb.com/

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I met with a local distinguished graphic and web designer this past week and came out of a two and a half hour enlightened, thought-filled, and inspired.